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JFrog Artifactory as VCF Software Depot for VCF Installer & SDDC Manager

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JFog Artifactory is widely used by enterprises as a centralized software repository for managing packages, dependencies, and build artifacts. Recently, we have had several customers asking whether Artifactory can be used as a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Software Depot for both the VCF Installer and SDDC Manager?

Any software repository solution should work as long as the VCF software binaries and metadata can be accessed by either the VCF Installer or SDDC Manager over HTTP(S) with basic authentication. While I have been a consumer of Artifactory before, I have actually never set it up before and this was a good learning opportunity!

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Identifying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) managed service accounts in vCenter Server

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When users log in to a vCenter Server to manage roles and permissions within a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 environment, they may notice several accounts that already have vSphere permissions assigned.


This might come as a surprise, especially if you do not recall creating these users, let alone granting them privileges within vCenter Server.

A large majority of the user accounts that you see are internal to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and represents the different application services running within the VCSA. There are also a handful of VCF accounts that are automatically created to enable communication between the various VCF components, but at the end of the day these are all service accounts that is either managed by vCenter Server or VCF.

With that said, it might be useful to understand which of these accounts are service accounts, so organizations can properly audit their environment for compliance and configuration management.

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Configuring VCF Automation (VCFA) Organization Portal OIDC IdP using Terraform Provider for VCFA

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I recently demonstrated how to automate the configuration of the VCF Automation (VCFA) Provider Portal using the new Terraform Provider for VCFA. You can also use the same provider to configure your VCFA Organization Portals.

In this blog post, I will use the Terraform Provider for VCFA (TF4VCFA) to configure a specific VCFA Organization Portal with an External Identity Provider (IdP), which can be super helpful if you need to manage multiple IdPs for each VCFA Organizations. The current release of the TF4VCFA only supports configuring an OIDC or LDAP resource, but VCFA does have support for OIDC, LDAP and SAML IdPs.

Since I use Keycloak as my IdP of choice, I will be demonstrating how to setup the OIDC IdP within VCFA.

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